​​When adopting a new technology it can sometimes help to include a familiar paradigm. This helps users see how their understanding of the old technology applies to the new one.

Companies should have Email Groups for the main offices, and one for the rest of the world. To help figuring out what channels to be posting to and what content is appropriate, recreate these groups as Slack channels.​

Related Rule

One of the main strengths of Slack is that, unlike SMS, Skype, and to some extent email, it is a pull based system, meaning that you only go to it in your own time to look at topics you’re interested in, rather than having the information pushed to you with attention grabbing notifications. For this reason, it’s important that you turn off the sounds on the iOS app, and potentially all notifications all together.​​​

With all these different tools being used to collect information in your application, a developer will frequently need to visit many different sites to get information like:

Was the last build successful?

What version is in production?

What errors are being triggered on the app?

Is the server running slow?

What is James working on?

This is where a tool like Slack comes in handy. It can help your team aggregate this information from many separate sources into one dedicated channel for your project. The other benefits also include a new team member instantly having access to the full history of the channel as well so no conversations are lost.

​​At SSW we integrate Slack with:

Octopus Deploy

RayGun.io

TeamCity

Visual Studio

Even better, you can create bots in slack to manage things like deployments and updating release notes.

Good example - One centralized location for team chat, deployment issues, exceptions and TFS changes

Help and improve these rules

Nothing great is easy. The SSW rules are a great resource for developers all around the world.
However it’s hard to keep rules current and correct. If you spot a rule that is out of date, please email or if you are cool tweet me.